Our Landscaping Fun

So, I’m afraid of bees. I’m actually terrified of bees. I have a severe phobia, and I’ve decided to try to deal with it using a little exposure therapy. So I’ve been tackling lawn care and some super amateur gardening. So here is a couple of pictures of our nice landscaping that we were lucky enough to find after all of the snow melted.

This is our front yard and patio. It’s really not too weedy either. That’s really exciting for me since I’ve been killing weeds left and right. This is also our no longer flowering lilac tree-bush.

This is our back yard. Isn’t that an adorable well cover? It’s also not too weedy, though they have started trying to take over our driveway….

This is an awesome bush near our front door. We have no idea what it is, just that it’s awesome.

These are some pretty flowers on one of the bushes by our patio. But, now we get to the less pretty landscaping. First, the side yard. This is primarily weeds. I killed a lot of dandelions, only to pave the way for some different weeds.

It doesn’t look too bad here, but here’s a couple of pictures closer and pre-mowing:

Here are the weeds that popped up in just about a week after the dandelions died.

Here’s a lot of dead dandelions. Awesome. I’m actually thinking that I may just dig this whole area of yard up and reseed it. I’ll hopefully be making that decision in the next couple of weeks. Any recommendations?

And another little issue is flooding in the corner of the side yard near the front door. You can see it in the distance in the image above but here’s a couple of close-ups of the damage that comes from it.

You can see here that there’s a drainage pipe running through the sidewalk.

In this image, you can tell that the pipe makes sense on the right side, where there is a step down, but on the left the dirt just builds up and the pipe clogs and then everything floods. I’m planning on getting some stones or tiles from a home improvement store and setting up a drainage channel and then planting grass seed all the way up to the edges. I’m still working on the design of the stone for this project though. More updates on that when I get to it!